6:13 am

Thu July 24, 2014

How High Debt From The Housing Collapse Still Stifles Our Economy

An artist's installation shows pre-foreclosed homes in Newark, N.J., in July 2009 at the Queens Museum of Art in New York City.

Mario TamaGetty Images

"Foreclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure."

Real estate broker John Susani drives down a Paterson, N.J., street where every third house seems to be abandoned or boarded up. During the boom years, money flooded into Paterson.

"The banking industry allowed everyone to be a homeowner; they gave mortgages to people [just because they were] breathing," Susani says.

In some cases, he says, home prices jumped as much as 50 percent. The homes on these streets aren't worth nearly that much anymore.

Seven years after the subprime mortgage crisis, U.S. economic growth remains subdued, despite significant ongoing help from the Federal Reserve. Now two economists have come up with new evidence about what's holding the economy back. In their book House of Debt, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi say consumers remain constrained by debt they took on when times were good.

In the volatile months after the subprime crisis, the Bush and Obama administrations put a lot of energy into stabilizing the financial system. The idea was to keep the banks healthy so they'd lend more. In a sense the policies worked — the banks gradually recovered. But the economy remained sluggish for a long time. To understand why, says Princeton economist Atif Mian, you have to look at debt.

Household debt doubled between 2000 and 2007 to $13 trillion, according to Equifax and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and much of it was taken on by working- and middle-class Americans whose incomes were flat or even falling.

"So you had a situation where even though people were getting poorer in terms of their real wages, they were taking on more and more debt," Mian says.

He says a big part of the problem is that so much of the debt went into mortgages and home equity loans. He says mortgages are inherently risky for borrowers — when house prices fall they can quickly lose whatever equity they've built up, but still have to pay the bank what they owe. And he says by late 2007 prices were falling and a lot of people were in over their heads.

"When that realization sets in, what is going to happen with the borrowers?" he says. "Well, they are going to cut back on their spending and save."

And Mian says that's what a lot of people have done. In their book House of Debt, Mian and his co-author, Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago, looked at economic data in different zip codes across the country. And they've documented something that a lot of people have long suspected: Debt has a corrosive effect on the economy.

Atif and Mian found that in places where housing prices were flat, including Texas and the Midwest, consumer spending has been pretty stable. But in places where house prices fell the most, consumer spending plummeted.

In Paterson, many homeowners were wiped out. They slashed their spending, and many local businesses failed.

And what happened in places like Paterson has happened many times before all over the world. Mian says periods of very high household borrowing, such as the U.S. in the 1920s or Japan in the 1980s, often have been followed by steep downturns.

"We have seen this over and over again, where a rapid rise in private debt, household debt, is very often followed by a deep and longer recession," he says.

Mian says when this happens demand falls and it's hard to revive it, even when the Fed lowers interest rates to the floor. House of Debt argues that the Obama administration should have worked harder to help struggling homeowners pare down their debt, even if it meant forcing banks to forgive part of their loans.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who led President Obama's National Economic Council from 2009 to the end of 2010, said in his positive review of House of Debt that such a plan never would have passed Congress.

"There was essentially no chance of it getting the requisite 60 votes in the Senate, where we were not even able to muster a simple majority," Summers wrote in the Financial Times. "Should a more Herculean effort have been made? Perhaps. But the president and his team felt that in a world where many legislative battles lay ahead, a failure ... would be costly in time and political capital."

But Summers also praised Mian and Sufi's book for bringing more light to what happens when consumers are encouraged to borrow too much, the impact of which we're still seeing today.

"All future work on financial crises will have to reckon with the household balance sheet effects they stress," he wrote. "After their work, we can still believe in the necessity of financial rescues; however, we can no longer believe in their sufficiency. And after their work, we have an important new agenda of reforms to consider if future crises are to be prevented."

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Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Six years after the subprime mortgage crisis sparked the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has yet to fully recover. Policymakers have long debated why, whether the government's response to the crisis was adequate or excessive. Now, in their new book "House Of Debt," two economists assert the real problem is that consumers remain constrained by debt they took on when times were good. And they say Washington has largely failed to address the problem. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: In the volatile months after the subprime crisis, the Bush and Obama administrations put a lot of energy into stabilizing the financial system. The idea was to keep the banks healthy so they'd lend more. In a sense, the policies worked. The banks gradually recovered, but the economy remained sluggish for a long time. To understand why, says Princeton economist Atif Mian, you have to look at debt. Household debt doubled between 2000 and 2007, and much of it was taken on by working and middle-class people whose incomes were flat or even falling.

ATIF MIAN: So you had a situation where even though people were getting poorer in terms of their real wages, they were taking on more and more debt.

ZARROLI: Mian says a big part of the problem is that so much of the debt went into mortgages and home equity loans. He says mortgages are inherently risky for borrowers. When house prices fall, the borrowers quickly lose whatever equity they've built up, but they still have to pay the bank what they owe. And he says by late 2007, prices were falling, and a lot of people were in over their heads.

MIAN: When that realization sets in, what is going to happen with the borrowers? Well, they are going to try to cut back on their spending and save.

ZARROLI: And Mian says that's what a lot of people have done. In their book, "House Of Debt," Mian and his co-author Amir Sufi, of the University of Chicago, looked at economic data in different zip codes across the country. And they've documented something that a lot of people have long suspected; debt has a corrosive effect on the economy. Atif and Mian found that in places where housing prices were flat, such as Texas and the Midwest, consumer spending has been pretty stable. But in places where housing prices fell the most, consumer spending plummeted. They're places such as Paterson, New Jersey, a faded industrial city west of New York.

JOHN SUSANI: Foreclosure. Foreclosure. Foreclosure.

ZARROLI: Real estate broker John Susani takes me down a street where every third house seems to be abandoned or boarded up. During the boom years, money flooded into Paterson.

SUSANI: The banking industry allowed everyone to be a homeowner. They gave mortgages to people that were breathing.

ZARROLI: So how much did prices go up during the boom years?

SUSANI: Oh, in some cases, as much as 50 percent. The problem is now those homes are not worth that 50 percent. We've seen a massive reduction in property values.

ZARROLI: Many Paterson homeowners were wiped out. They cut back on spending. And a lot of local businesses failed.

SUSANI: So now, if you were a local grocery store, a little mom-and-pop operation, that obviously took money from your sales for the year. And you see that in different parts of the community.

ZARROLI: And what happened in places such as Paterson has happened many times before, all over the world. Mian says periods of very high, household borrowing, such as the U.S. in the 1920s or Japan in the 1980s, have often been followed by steep downturns.

MIAN: We have seen this over and over again, where a rapid rise in private debt, household debt, is very often followed by a deep and long recession.

ZARROLI: Mian says when this happens, demand falls. And it's hard to revive it, even when the Fed lowers interest rates to the floor. "House Of Debt" argues that the Obama administration should've worked harder to help struggling homeowners pare down their debt, even if it meant forcing banks to forgive part of their loans. Former administration official Larry Summers argued in a recent op-ed that such measures would simply have never gotten through Congress, and economist Christopher Mayer of Columbia Business School agrees. But Mayer, like Summers himself, has plenty of praise for the book.

CHRISTOPHER MAYER: I think one of the things that Mian and Sufi have done really well is push us back to thinking about the role of consumers in the economy. And, you know, I think that that's a really important contribution.

ZARROLI: Until now, he says, much of our understanding of the downturn has centered on the role played by banks and the collapse of big financial houses such as Lehman Brothers. "House Of Debt" says the seeds of the downturn were planted much earlier, when consumers were encouraged to borrow so much. And the impact of that borrowing is still being felt today. Jim Zarroli. NPR News, New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.